It will probably take more than a human FOXP2 gene to reach this future.Scientists have started to look at DNA to try to figure out why we can speak and other animals can't. One gene that has caught their attention is called FOXP2.
People with a certain version of this gene have trouble forming words and speaking but are otherwise OK. This is exactly what you would expect if a gene were primarily involved in speech.
One way to test this idea would be to put the human version of the gene into an animal and see what happens to that animal's speech. A natural candidate would be the chimpanzee. Humans and chimps are around 98.8% similar at the DNA level* and their FOXP2 gene has only two differences.
Unfortunately (or fortunately...), we can't yet do this experiment because we aren't very good at changing a chimp's genes. But what we are good at is changing a mouse's gene. And this is exactly what scientists did in a new study.
The scientists changed a mouse's FOXP2 gene into a human's. Now no one expected that we'd have a Mickey Mouse on our hands. Mice just don't have all the equipment for speech and it is really unlikely that the only difference between mice and people in terms of speech is this gene.